Friday, May 15, 2009

Monday, May 11, 2009

No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.

Predictably, the week before a big trial, I've contracted a bug. We had to pull over about halfway home from Lexington yesterday and crash in a motel for about four hours because I wasn't going to make it all the way. This morning I feel awful and have to get my hearings for the day covered, so I'm home enjoying some participant-observation in the "febrile phantasmagoria" genre. Tomorrow, the grind begins in earnest.

When this trial ends, I'm coming back to World of Thool as my primary setting project, but will work on Ordained Dominion of Vologes on the side. (I'm getting Thool ideas percolating, and at the most inappropriately distracting time.)

I've decided, since I have no plans to publish Thool material beyond a campaign wiki, to open up the source material to include weird fantasy, fairy tale, and folklore elements from non-public domain sources. The original intent of the project was to see what I could do with a narrow public domain canon, and I'm satisfied that the answer is "quite a bit." Now I'm relaxing and using whatever I feel like using -- homages and direct lifts from later literature, comic books, video games, and the whole panoply of eerie shit that's readily available to me.

I'm not coherent enough this morning to outline what that means, exactly. I don't believe the tone of the Thool setting will change appreciably, I'll just have a more expansive toolbox. When I feel better and the trial is over, I'll set out some sort of calculus for what goes into Thool and what goes into Vologes (which will almost certainly become a sub-realm of Thool).

The short version is that Thool is a bizarre interdimensional dumping ground purpose-built for weird fantasy adventure gaming with desultory lip service to any unified aesthetic, and Vologes is a more coherently themed "traditional European fantasy" area. Thool is where you go if you'd like to play a Munchkin Wizard seeking a looming tooth of the Fenris Wolf jutting from the loam of a leprous grove in the shadow of a calcified Titan; Vologes is where you go if you'd like to play a grim Free Lance serving a Marcher Baron in skirmishes with witch-armored Knights Libertine and renegade Skraelings. Different strokes.

Anyway, Thool is opening up a lot once I've recharged, and Vologes will continue as an active side project. Hopefully I can maintain both blogs. I also hope to resume administering the PBP at some point.

I've often shied away from non-game-related blog entries, or cleared them out shortly after publication, in an attempt to keep this blog focused and navigable. Now that I have a campaign wiki to keep things organized, I'll probably start using the Thool blog as an occasional venue for ventings and ramblings regarding personal matters, vapid and self-absorbed musings on music, literature, cultural detritus, and so on. I apologize in advance for this window into madness/banality. I just don't want to start another fucking blog so I can plague the world with my pearls-beyond-price regarding whatever crap music I'm listening to, or poetry I'm misinterpreting.